Final Cut Pro X

Lesson 7 of 17

Editing Audio

Final Cut Pro X

Lesson 7 of 17

Editing Audio

Lesson Info

Editing Audio

We are going to wrap up our overview of final cut pro tens interface by working with some audio and just giving you the general the general gist of what we can do on the surface with audio, audio functionality and follicle pretends pretty powerful it's a lot that we can do we're just going to scratch the surface just to give you an idea of how to work with audio clips here on timeline and what we can do to kind of clean up some common problems like noise on dh things that tend to creep into our audio clips that could be easily removed using some pretty, pretty neat functionality is where we get into that. Do you want to make sure everyone here is good as faras questions? I'm thinking before that, do you have any questions better? Yeah, actually, I was wondering if you are using the blade tool and you accidentally cut a clip, um and then move on and do some other stuff? Is there a way to to merge those clips back together? There's no way to merge the clips back together again. You could...

undo you could just hit, you know, commands and will undo if you've made a mistake the boo boo like that, you can't use them back together, what you can do is actually and if you want to flip over here to the final cut system for a second I can't show you, eh? So for example let's say we accidentally bladed that I didn't mean to play that well I can't fuse them back together, but what I could do if I really wanted to was delete the one I didn't want and then just grab the original one and re extended that's one way to fix it um one thing I forgot to mention before about working in final cut pretend, which is a really fantastic because of the way the file system works and it's a dual file system database dual database you have unlimited undoes from the time you open the program until however many hours go by working in it because we don't have to keep hitting save it doesn't store of a large cache of undoes and it's saving every time it's basically created a virtual version of the project. Every time you make change you khun undo back to the point where you open the program which is really helpful eso back in the day it was like, you know you are certain traditional program so you could have you get twenty undoes and that's it so if you made twenty one mistakes you were beaten but it's a kind of a cool thing it's like a pretend they actually addressed that so you have ah large amount of undoes which is fantastic thanks for asking the question is perfect okay so let's continue on let's work with some audio and I just have a couple keynote slides I want to go through here so tech guys if we could just put the keynote quick couple notes on editing audio and this is universal for video editing regardless of what program you're using but video editing in general really requires you to become a jack of all trades we're not just working with video we're working with a multitude of different media types were working video we're working with audio we're working with graphics were working with aa lot of time you have to be your own colorist you know we know what we don't have these big budgets chances are you're not working on a project where you have okay well you're just the story editor so you're going on ly deal with video and audio and then somebody else is going to take the project from you and they're going to color it modern day video editor is really going to have to be able to do it all so we do have to learn to work with many many different types of media and audio is probably the most important because audio bad audio in general will ruin a video I don't care how beautiful the video is if you have bad audio chances are it's going to be ruined eh so we have to be really careful with how we work with audio and making sure that audio acquired in the field is of good quality because there's only so much that we can do to it. Okay, audio is really not like raw video or raw images where we can fix certain things once audio. Well, let me put the analogy to you this way we have an image, we take a photo and there's some highlight areas that are overexposed. If you're shooting in raw you khun go and retrieve some of that data, you know, especially if you have a high dynamic range you can pull back. Some of that data in the highlights that you may have lost audio is not a case like that. If you blow out audio areas or distorted or overexpose it, so to speak or over modulated it's ruined, you can't fix it. So final cut another video and audio editing programs have ways that we can remove common minor problems, but once audio is blown out, it's gone. So we really have to train ourselves in a minor sense to become audio engineers and understand some basics about audio to make you a better video editor is like I said, you can you can put together a great video, but if the audio is not done right subliminally and subconsciously, your viewers going to sense that something is not right they may not come out and reveal itself to them in the foreground they might not go well he didn't apply a limiter or but they'll notice will say okay, well, this looks great but this sound is not soothing to my years I never noticed when you watch you watch tv and you're watching commercials and it goes from, you know, maybe a national commercial to a local one and he noticed the drastic difference in the audio on dh you don't know what it is that first automatically know that's like a poor quality video poor quality commercial and you don't know why but times is because of the audio right? And it can be very distracting because audio is really what drives the story okay here's analogy I want you to try to envision you're walking down a street and you've got a really expensive pair of noise canceling headphones on okay? They're like bows, you know, paid six hundred dollars they've got dr dre on the side there just really high quality you can't hear anything he has that's obvious. So you say you got these big headphones on and you can't hear anything and you're walking down the street, you come across a fight is a street fight okay? And you see people shoving and pushing and throwing punches and things like that and it's it's interesting you're looking at what was going on and then you turn all the way around a hundred eighty degrees and you're no longer looking at the fight. Well, that fight is no longer engaging your senses, okay? You might know what's happening but you're not looking at it and you can't hear anything so it really is not engaging you anymore. Okay, now take the headphones off and what do you hear immediately you'll notice specific sounds that are related to that event and then what? They may be somewhat dramatic you might hear people screaming you might people here people falling down and getting hurt you might hear the sound of like flesh on flesh you might hear girlfriends on the sidelines screaming you know you might hear gravel you might hear feet dragging on the gravel is something musically and drive away by the hair I mean all of these things you're painting a really fantastic story visualize the idea what a story teller idea go ahead so audio is what makes it really it's what brings in the drum? The drama because it's dramatic toe look at but it's not as dramatic is when you're all of your senses are engaged on dh that's why movies are so effective and that's why we get so wrapped up in ah story I mean I could go to a movie theater and go like this and it's not gonna have the same effect but if I'm you know they're surround sound happening over here and bullets the sound of bullets are whizzing past my ears and their screams happening behind me like that's really powerful stuff and movies generally speaking we'll use what we call sound design to make things seem more dramatic or more uplifting or to put an emotion in your mind and in your heart and get you to feel those emotions your job is a video editor is to also be a sound artist don't think for a second that you can learn video editing and just ignore audio you're sadly mistaken and I've seen those who do and that's why they're workers and will never reach another level or won't reach another level until they embrace the fact that audio needs to play a huge part so capturing clean audio is really really important it's also really, really difficult if you're fortunate enough to be working with you know in editing with audio that was captured really cleanly there's a very minimal noise and it's got very few problems you're going to find your job is an audio artist or an audio sound designer much easier because it's so much easier to what we call sweeten audio than it is to correct audio all right we're going to talk about a little bit about both right here okay so just keep these points in mind video requires you to be of jack of all trades color audio story telling the whole nine yards audio is the most important part in my opinion on bad and poorly edited audio will ruin video take that case in point that that little clip that we put together it before the break and you heard the audio kind of jump a little bit that distracts you well that's the type of thing I'm talking about it doesn't have to be like booming seven point one surround dolby dolby audio it just has to be clean if your audio is clean it will not detract from your video and that's what we should be striving for audio that does not detract from the video presentation so bad audio can be fixed to an extent but this saying is universal in every facet of media production garbage in garbage out always it's a universal rule it's like gravity okay so what we're going to do in this segment is going to get we're gonna get a feel for working with audio on the project timeline we're gonna work with volume and gain control panning channels working with stereo if you're not familiar with panning will explain it for you we're going to do some j and l editing what jnl edits are edits that blend video and audio together to give you a seamless presentation of you of both of those media elements okay we're going to fix some common audio problems and we're gonna import and work with some music all right, just to give you an overall sense again, these are all things were really going to go into depth with tomorrow when we go through my wedding workflow, we actually edit a film, okay? So we're gonna have all of this stuff demonstrated in much higher quality were much more depth tomorrow, but let's, let's again, let's, scratch the surface here on my timeline. I've got a couple of clips, and again, we're working with the yoga footage and that we're working with earlier. And the first clip is vanessa, I think I kind of illustrated this before, but I kind of want to run through it again. Vanessa's audio really easy. Simple move. This was from an overhead mike a boom mike very high quality boom like that. It was suspended just outside the frame on the top of that frame. Okay, picking up was pointed directly in her mouth. It was a shotgun microphone. So it's kind of reaching out, pulling the sound in or reaching out and grabbing sound and the quality's really nicely just listening. That's going to do some really easy, simple moves that you can do it home by yourself. Okay, now, this is what it would sound like without that you are going to address all of the symptoms that photographers had, okay? Yeah, not too pleasing, you know, very echoey conned distracts and if I put music for that, just something would seem off because the music is so high quality and well produced and then you have crappy audio on top of it just like brandon a shotgun mike that you were using I don't you know that meeting here is the news, but that is a chef's chefs is a brand of microphone to make audio component and they make amazing stuff I'm not quite sure of the model number I think it was the seven siri's, but all with which model exactly it's about a two thousand dollar microphone all right doesn't mean you have to spend two thousand dollars to get good audio quality this microphone I'm wearing right here is probably about two hundred fifty bucks if you're listening at home and you hear my voice, it sounds really good these guys know what they're doing it's also running through processing it's running through compressors and it's actually being processed into a much more robust rich sound. This microphone was recording into a four channel mixer called a roland are forty four which has a nice components nice electronics it was picking up a nice clean signal on the wire we were using was quality there were no king snow short circuits anything like that so we have this nice clean sound getting quality sound on a shoot should be your first priority and I tell people this all the time if you're a wedding cinematographer or events cinematographer and you go out to a job and you buy a lens if you spend more money on your lenses than you do your audio that's why it's kind of natural cause lenses are more expensive than audio but you should be investing in audio first because upping the quality of your audio will automatically enhance the overall quality of your of your production where buying a new lens is going to be barely noticeable in some cases to your clients and left with the lens you can still get a great image out of the lens you know using what you know about photography and filmmaking but with audio if you have a crappy microphone you're going to get support subpar sound so it directly related you know what you pay for is what you get when it comes to audio so investing in the audio equipment before investing in london's is definitely advised exactly with that in mind you just saw the difference between what would be considered bad audio and good audio ok and now what we're gonna do is work with this audio on the timeline here to try to get a sense for how we can make it sound as good as we can make it sound so the first thing I'm gonna want to deal and again we had to sink this footage up we're not gonna get in a sinking yet. I promise you tomorrow we'll get the singing but basically we want to take the sound that's associated with this video clip because that's where the bad sounds coming from we are going to address but we don't want that we just want to turn that off. Get rid of it. There's a couple different ways we can do that we can either. Okay, mediums demonstrate this zoom in. You see here on this video clip we have an audio way for turning down within audio away form here. Okay? And this is showing us on actual visual representation of the audio associated with this video clip. I don't want to use it. I want to use what's down here on this really high quality external audio. So we had this line that sort of runs across the top of the audio way form, but just beneath the thumbnail image and we call this the rubber band, I call it the rubber band. Okay? Because we can actually flex this thing and do all kinds of things with it and that's a little bit more advanced, but the term sort of applies we called the rubber band so I can click and drag this and you'll see where it says eight d b there that is the current volume of that audio right right now it's set to eight d b when you bring in audio by default it'll go to it'll be set to zero d b doesn't matter how you recorded it final cut pro is going to take that initial audio level and read that a zero d b zero d b does not mean off okay zero d b means it's at it's normalized level okay don't don't worry about the too much notice what happens when I click this rubber band and drag down now we're into negative numbers okay negative numbers denote a decrease in volume positive numbers over zero denote an increase in volume so think of it as like fahrenheit celsius sort of thing okay zero is not freezing in fahrenheit negative thirty thirty I'm sorry I always get that confused I'm sorry thirty two's considered freezing and zero is you know just zero whatever it is but zero and celsius is considered the freezing mark so you're sort of going sub zero and positive above zero so we're just going to drag this down so if I want to lower the volume on this clip I'm just gonna bring it down all the way and you're going to see when all the way down to negative ninety six and that's just the way follow that's it up it just allows for you to go that low with the audio it's probably inaudible around like negative twenty five or negative thirty but it allows you to bring it all the way down now that audio is no longer audible okay you're not going to hear it anymore we've turned down the audio on that clip we don't want that so we just want to hear what's down here by the way you'll notice down here that this clip is actually off okay I've turned it off by using the keyboard shortcut v okay notice how it's on now it's brighter green if I highlight this clip and hit v it disables it that goes for any clip on your timeline okay watch this if I grab this clip and I had v it's gone it's not gone it's just disabled all right so I can do that with any clip so if you have clips they're stacked on top of each other such as this and we want to see what's beneath this clip just hit v and it will disable it okay but the point being here is that with this audio clip that I'm working with sorry I had turned it off just so I can hear what was on this video clip so I'm gonna turn this on and now when I play this back we should only hear the audio that's on the green external audio clip we are going helps when I turn on my speakers we are going to address all of the symptoms that photographers have okay, so now our audio was enabled we've turned down the volume of the audio that's on the video clip and we are in good shape now because that's exactly what we want the audio to sound like that's very, very helpful. Okay, cool. Now let's explore something else. This clip over here has audio attached to it let's say, for example, I want to trim the audio and video separately on the clip. All right, we can click double click on the way form of this video clip and watch what happens it expands its called expanding all right, now we can drag just the audio or just the video notice how the audio stays in place and now it's oh it's going underneath the clips that are being rippled towards it if I use my p tool, which we should all know now we're just extending a gap over it. We're just trimming the video, leaving the audio where it is and I could do the same thing here. I can expand the audio if there was more to it, okay, where I could just bring it down so that's pretty much the way that works but expanding will be really helpful when we get into things called j and l edits and we're going to touch on that in a few minutes I just wanted to kind of illustrate that we can still rubber band we can still grab our audio we can still kind of rubber band things to turn him up and down notice something else here I'm gonna zoom in a little bit more notice what happens when I adjust the rubber band look at the wave form it's actually decreasing and increasing as I do this notice what happens when I get into louder volumes? You start seeing some yellow there, right? That yellow is okay. All right? You don't want to go too far into the yellow because what happens if you go too far into the yellow is you'll start seeing red and when you start seeing red on an audio clip and for example, the way I could get us to read just you know, this is just an example of how we would do that just like a kind of illustrate that not necessarily is not necessarily something that I would want to do at this point but I just want to kind of explain if I want to crank this up. Whoa those what happens here you start seeing yellow and red that means this audio is going to sound horrible. All right, let me see if I can place back without blowing our moves that you can do it all right that's not good we don't ever want that top crest of the way for him to go flat once that happens audio is bad if you bring in your audio and it's already like that you've got that audio alright guys guess what there's no way to fix that okay so if I were to pull this all the way up and have flat top audio across the top and I exported my video like that it's going to sound awful all right? So we have to be real careful when working with audio just to kind of monitor the way form as we're changing audio levels and just get it to where it's been barely peeking up into the yellow and we should be in pretty good shape at that point so I'm just gonna come over here to the audio clip that we wanted to really work with and I'm just going to expand it a little bit more to get the audio just barely peeking at its highest points into the yellow okay why does it make a difference? Well let's talk about audio meters okay? Audio meters as we kind of explained before can be found right here in the background tat next to the background task window. Okay, these little audio meters here ok? If I click them they will appear over here on the bottom right hand side in a much bigger window giving us in a more accurate representation with a scale notice the positive and negative numbers on the scale if I play back this audio let me re enable her video clip and just watch these audio meteors and what they do is they play back. We are going to address all of the symptoms that photographers have back pain, elbow pain, hips, knees all your joint great. That actually sounds pretty good. My goal when I'm working with audio is to get it peaking up roughly right around this negative six line. Okay, why negative six and not zero? Well, there's couple reasons if I was producing something for broadcast okay to be aired on a cable network, something that was going to be transmitted over airwaves, you want to stay within legal limits so we don't distort audio on broadcast, so zero would sort of be the benchmark for broadcast. I'm going to take a gamble on, say most of us are not doing broadcast work and most of us are out putting to either dvds we're out putting to the web and delivering our clients some sort of a product based in that in that way, therefore, we can focus on just getting our audio somewhere between negative six and zero. I like to aim for peking right around negative six the reasons being and these air these numerals are decibel levels. Okay, it's, just a digital measurement of audio volume. Okay, technically, this is called a v u meter volume units meter but we call him audio meters. Okay? We're not working on broadcast. The only thing you really need to know when you're getting started is just try to get your audio level somewhere up around that negative six range. Jj, if my audio were too quiet, if I bring it down here by grabbing the rubber band I play this back. Listen to the audio. We are going to address all of the symptoms. That's really quiet audio meters, air running somewhere around between negative forty and negative thirty. Okay that's called running in the mud that's the industry term for it muddy the audio's, muddy it's too low. Okay to bring that up, we can do it in real time in final cut pro tend by playing it back and then moving the rubber band at the same time. Watch what happens. We are going to address all of the symptoms that photographers have cool so I can adjust it on the fly, which is fantastic. So right here you can see I'm starting to peak right up into the yellow and my loudest parts my audio and you'll see that the on the wave on the e meter you're starting to see that peak the volume levels of the green pickup around negative six let's play back again, we are going to address all of the symptoms so that loud it's part where she says all of those symptoms watch the watch the meter's going to address all of the symptoms right around negative six perfect that's sort of where we want audio to lie now what happens if we have multiple audio sources if I add music to this what's gonna happen anybody you guess only this shot ever it's gonna get louder it's gonna bring that it's gonna bring up the overall mix the overall sound mix so we have to just keep that in mind and later on when we're done with our project we have to go back and do a sound mix to make sure all of these levels stay within normal limits so we have to be careful in there some tools and some great tricks and plug ins to use in this program they'll help us to do an amazing job with that. So just in a nutshell that's how you raise and lower audio another way to do it would be to select the clip and I'm going to introduce you to something that we have not yet covered. We've talked about the inspector when no over here on the right the top right hand side okay, well, the inspector window if I were to close it has information about you know when we talked about has information about the clip that we had selected so if I select my audio clip and I use command our keyboard command command eight it's going to open up my audio enhancements window okay, this gives me ah bunch of different tools actually increase loudness remove background noise and if we have ah hum possibly from fluorescent lighting or electrical lines that might have been too close to our audio source we can remove those to a point all right? Another way that we can a just the volume this is called gained by the way they say loudness it's actually called game right? So you can use either term if you're speaking and follicle pretend terms loudness is what they call it, but it's technically called game if I use this little arrow right here and just back out to this and this is the main part of the inspector window, we see a couple windows here. One of them called what was called volume and pen, this slider knob or slider, slider, slider think whatever you wanna call it is the same thing is moving up and down on the on the rubber band. Okay, so if we just adjust that down and up, you'll notice that our wave form down in the bottom increases or decreases, okay, we can also type in a number of value here too, so right now I am set at plus two d b if I want to be at sixty b I type six hit enter and it increases at the six if I want to be at negative for I can do that as well just because you type something in here as a number value doesn't mean it's in a correlate to the number values here okay this is just a unit of control just to give you a sense of where you are all right? So we can increase here decrease here or we can increase and decrease here either one doesn't matter all right? We can also add gain by going into our audio enhancements by clicking down here and we can add more game let's say we really needed let's say for example this audio was recorded really quiet ok and may be at its loudest even though we just hypothetically speaking follow me here I had this cranked up to twelve d b let's just say but it was still on ly peaking right about right around there and it's too quiet this is the perfect opportunity for us to use game and I would click loudness and now I can increase the game to a point that gets me where I need to be okay and I might need to go and actually add a filter of morgaine it just depends on what I'm doing okay but that's where that would come in handy let's, focus on a couple things up here real quick in the inspector window under audio. Why is there only audio and no video right here? Woakes we're working with an audio clip by collect on a video clip that has audio. I will have a video and audio tab, but right now we're working with an audio clip, so I'm just going to click that and underneath words his volume and pan we have audio enhancements right here words. His audio analysis. This is interesting stuff. Final cut pro ten can actually automatically analyze your audio to tell you if you have problems. Okay, pretty powerful stuff and we can do that upon import. Remember when we were importing our media earlier in the day I hit command. I and I grab a piece of audio or video let's just saying click import right here it'll say under audio do you want me to analyze and fix audio problems? Do you want me to separate mono and group stereo audio? Do you want me to remove silo on channels? These air cool things that final cup for will do for you whether or not you want them to do it will be personal preference and totally up to you, but I'll explain what they do, so you have an idea if I check analyzing fix audio problems okay on this clip and I click let me just make sure I'm going into the right place here tutorial that's fine and if I just click import here it's going to import that audio file into our tutorial event and now since I have these grouped by file type I can come up here away form audio and there it is it's called buzz dad wonder why it's called buzz dad was into this I'm jordan's father on behalf it's got a nasty buzzing it all right pretty bad stuff, right? Well, if I back out of here, watch this. Look, if I have this clip selected look over here at the audio enhancements related to that clip potential problems detected final cut pro knows there's something wrong with that video clip? How doesn't know that? Well it's analyzing the way form it's analyzing all the parameters and the data that comes with an audio way form and it's telling me you know what, dude, I think you have some hum in that clip that's telling me by putting this little yellow explanation point right here you've got hum so possibly by using this hum removal you might be able to get rid of that that's pretty cool so final cut washing go through and tell you if things are too quiet it's too quiet you might get one of those that'll warnings right here under loudness ifyou've got excessive background noise like a fan or an air conditioning unit things that were in low frequencies like like noises like that it'll probably show up here under background noise removal and give you a little yellow warning that's great man if you see a red warning there it knows you've got serious problems okay, so we can let final cut pro analyze and fix those problems however again I said it before I don't really like trust final cut to do any of my correcting by itself I like to just sort of let it do its own thing. Um, there is one thing I will let it do once in a while if I go back into my import window and I click on one of these audio clips and I click import the one that says remove silent channels this could be really helpful if you're working with certain audio recorders that record on li toe one channel okay own if you guys have ever encountered this but sometimes we're going to get into what stereo is in a second if you're doing a wedding and you mike the groom up and you have like this little pocket recorder and maybe you plugged the mic into it and you put it on him okay that recorder depending on the mike that you plug in my only record toe one channel so it's only coming out the left speaker this would remove the other channel remove silent channels would just take it out completely see you don't have to deal with it all right and what that said that leads me into my next part we're going to talk about stereo audio a little bit and panning because if we select an audio clip and we look in our audio inspector on the top it's doesn't say just volume it's his pen well what is panning you don't know a panning is panning is telling the audio what speakers to come out of okay mano and stereo or two turns you need to be familiar with mono what is mano mean way talking about ma won right mano means one's amano could be referring to one channel or the same thing in two channels it's mano each one is no different than the other or you just have one okay stereo is left and right your left ear and you're right here that stereo we all here in stereo surround okay we hear things behind us were things in front of us were things on the sides of us we here in stereo okay so audio can be handled handled in both ways well check out this if I come in here to this little tutorial project that I have pre baked you'll see I have two audio files down here well these audio files our stereo audio this is this is one on the top is our left channel this one on the bottom is the right channel I'm going to play these back and listen to the speakers and guys if we could have a little audio in the studio I want you guys to listen to the speakers of how they're coming out it helps if you really if you're at home if you have your speakers one on either side of you it'll really help me to kind of listen to this try to see where the differences and if you want to watch a visual a visual representation of it look att the audio meters over here and see if you watch it just watch what happens groovy right that's a perfect example of stereo. Okay, this top ones left channel so if I disable this bottom one just by hitting the wiki and I only play back the top one that's all I'm gonna hear even when I get to the part where this is supposed to play down here let's add back in the right channel wait it'll sound mixing going on there but basically that's that's the idea behind between left and right now I just play the right channel if I wanted to also okay, so this is important to know why is it important to know because a lot of audio stereo music hysteria okay, chances are, though, if you download a piece of music and use it, you're not gonna have the ability to separate the channels. Not always. Sometimes you can buy high quality audio that's what they call channel configured where you can actually remove different channels. Very rare, but generally speaking, you're going to use stereo and a couple of different ways you're going to use what's called panning perfect case in point. Let's. Go back here, let's. Say, for example, I imported this audio of vanessa talking, okay? And it wasn't recorded in monnet. Wasn't recording stereo. I only had it in one channel. Okay, let's. Just assume it was in one channel and it's only coming out of the left speaker. If I play this back, look at the audio meter. We are going to address all of the symptoms that photographers had that's. Very common. It's very common. Tio. Bring an audio has only got one channel, but we need two pani to bring it to the center. Dialogue and talking should always be full. Stereo should be coming out of all speakers. Unless you're trying to create this effect where you have somebody talking over here and then somebody talking over here, then you can kind of mix those channels up. Okay, so maybe the man is over here, the woman's over here, and that will give the viewer the sense of being in the middle of a conversation, but generally speaking for corporate videos and weddings and events, we just put dialogue in both channels. Okay, so how do we do that? If I click on my video clip and come up here, you'll notice that there's a pan mode well, let's say, for example, in its default mode, it was all the way over to the left because that's, what the audio was when we recorded it. Okay, I can drag this pan slider over to the middle and now listen to it and watch the view meters. We are going to address all of the symptoms so simple fix to a very common problem, you can always pan your audio over. I can put it in the right channel if I want only to going to address all of the symptoms that photographers have back pain, elbow pain panning is really important to know how to use effectively because I can't say how many times I watched videos online and they didn't do this and on lee like the vows of the ceremony, only coming out of the left speaker and the being overpowered by music that's coming out of both okay, so you want to always do your game first to your volume control first then do you're panning justin or I'm sorry your pit forgive me panning first then your volume control this way you can judge correctly where your volume should lie volume that's only sound it's only coming out of one channel is not going to give you an accurate representation of volume. You are going to address all of the symptoms that photographers had back pain elbow okay, two channels always be louder than one, so just keep that in mind. That's panning there's an option down here for surround pan er okay, which is really kind of cool. I ca n't tell let's say I have and not that you really would. But this is just interesting to note. Let's say I was recording something and I wanted to are making a video when I want to be dolby five point one surround what? What is five point one mean? Okay, well, it simply means this there's five channels of audio, okay. And a subwoofer. Okay, five channels and a subwoofer. Subwoofer is that real deep bass that's the subwoofer. Okay, but you have five channels of high end audio I ca n't tell final cut hay put those sounds in this rear left speaker or maybe I have, for example oh, I don't know. I'm just going to make an example here. I'm going to throw another audio clip down here, let's, just say this is a gunshot, okay? And I want that gun shot to go. You know, I wanted to sort of go from left to right back to front or something like that. I can tell it to start here, set a mark, move down the line and then move that to the back and actually sound like in the speakers when somebody watches it, like zipping past their head, cool stuff, man, powerful stuff. And to do this with such ease, to be able to grab something in a is drag it like that there's a color becomes more substance and that are involved with but it's not that complicated. You get really powerful stuff for a video editing program. Okay? And, you know, a couple years ago that was on her, so panning is really important to make sure that your dialogue is coming out of both speakers. Okay, you always want to make sure of that. Just just make sure that that's actually happening for you, okay, so let's, actually turn off that surround panting I don't want it, I want it dead in the center boom, there we go. Sounds good to me, okay, so we've adjusted our game we've adjusted are panning there's a lot of different panning options here for surround mixing don't worry about them too much if you want to play around with them. By all means when it comes to audio and my work flow. It's very simple, basically just putting all of my dialogue in both channels and my music just goes where it's where it wants to go. What you're going to see tomorrow is how I make music blend with dialogue so it doesn't overpower. Okay, that's gonna be a really key part of tomorrow, so we'll talk about that then any questions about this part right now? Because there's more that goes into this as faras the auto analysis coz, but I don't really use it that much, so I don't want to get too far into that cause. I think it's going to just cause confusion. Any questions about this? Any questions in studio? Yeah, you mentioned earlier that when you have multiple audio recording devices, the levels are going to be different and you alluded, teo ways that you khun deal with that are we going to talk about? And we absolutely are great question that actually brings me to my next topic. That's really good that you mentioned that let's say for example, I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but I don't think this is beyond you guys at all right now at this stage let me let me go in here and select I'm gonna go into a different event that has a wedding, okay? And I'm going to just select the main event because in here I have some compound clips of things that were sync up with multiple cameras. Okay, so if I just double click this while you're going to see a ton of things happening here, okay, I'm just gonna zoom out. You kind of see what's happening what you have here are one, two, three, four different cameras, okay? And one, two, three different audio sources. All of these cameras have audio on them. Each of these three sources is a different audio sources. Well, okay, if I were to play this all back patrimony and do you pledge to love comfort and honor him in all times? It's all sync up because we did some sinking to it. Now watch what happens. I isolate these channels and we'll get to your question in a second watch what happens is going to go through these and to start isolating these channels we'll start with all of them playing it once, but such loving hearts they accept a very mature and meaningful task and taking on this marriage today and on their behalf I thank you for all that you have done to bring him to this place and I remind you that it is more than they who are joining their hearts here today for you are as well with this mirror is your two families do you notice that you see the audio meters what's happening there we have like things in the left channel only things in the right channel only things in the middle it's a mess okay there's a lot of work that needs to be done here there's this cool thing called channel configuration okay let's say I want to go back and just find that one that was just sorry rose but the left side just bear with me one second I just want to find this one clip here believably I think it's the last one let's go down here on the bottom and just clipped that ones yeah that's just coming out of the left channel there I can come over here to my audio inspector with that clip selected and go to channel configuration and I've got a lot the things happening here this little two right there I'm going to turn my skimming off just for a second by the way you can turn off the skimming of this, you know you can turn that off simply by hitting shift s actually will turn off so I can basically that little too that's right there is denoting that we do have two channels of audio but they're just panto one side so I can change that by coming up here to my channel configuration changing it from stereo to duel mano now I have to mano channels okay, watch what happens here when I play this back. Now today you proclaim your love and commitment to the world, so I ask that you turn tour. Okay now it's in both channels. That's a good sign. We definitely want that so channel configuration gives you power because here's the thing if you import audio and it's got two channels of audio attached to it, you're only going to see one clip like this if I want to see both channels, let me see this will actually work if I come up here, including gonna break apart clip items. No, because that was combined. Let me see if it'll work on this one that's because these are all combined. I apologize, but basically what we have here is the ability to separate channels to see them separately. Okay? And this takes some practice of kind of just getting a feel for how it works, but it gives us multi channel audio ability right inside final cut pro ten so we don't have to go into an audio editing program to separate channels and really start to mix things down. However, it does require your audio source to be recorded in multiple channel ls. Everything we've recorded here has been on one channel, okay, so if that makes sense, I know it's a little confusing. I didn't want to jump too far ahead, but that I just didn't want to kind of mention this channel configuration well do with dialogue like this marriage, is it coming? If it's not coming out of if it's not coming out of both speakers, I'll just change it to duel mano and that will solve my dollar dialogue probe program a problem rather so if you find yourself in a situation where you've only got it coming out of one speaker, you can either use the panning feature up here to pan it over, using stereo left and right and then moving it to the center okay or duel mano down here under channel configuration, you will see this in much detail tomorrow, I promise. All right, sam, you undo all this stuff that I did here because I don't really wanna mess too much with this because we're going to definitely be using this timeline tomorrow when we get into audio editing a little bit further okay, let's, solve some other problems. We talked about gain control. We talked about panning. We talked about the difference between stereo on mano we know now, excuse me. That dialogue wants that we should have it coming out of both channels. Let's, fix some issues like some of those noise issues that we had before. Let's, go back to our project library and I have a nice little segment or a little project in your called bad audio. All right, let's, listen to some bad audio. I'm just gonna play this back. I'm jordan's father on behalf myself. Okay, first things first, the volumes a little bit too low. I've got my speaker cranked up over here and it's on ly peaking you're his father on behalf right around like the negative twelve to negative ten range which is right in here. I want that to be peaking up here in negative six. Now, the problem is, the more I enhances audio, the more it's going to increase our noise. So let's, just do that. And let's, listen to the noise back here. I'm jordan's father on the half. Okay, so why did that happen? What happened? Well, I was plugged into a deejay sound system on this deejay probably spent about all of one hundred fifty bucks. On their wedding sound system it was an awful system and it gave me a really bad buzz like that really bad buzzes like that can also come from being too close to electrical lines if you have your recorder and the wires coming from your recorder teo tapping into a soundboard and it's laying next to a power wire if the wire's not shielded correctly you could get noise like that. That kind of noise isn't that hard to remove the problem with removing that noise is it's going to affect the quality of the voice? In my opinion, good quality voice has a nice rich base it's got nice clarity and sound quality to it the second we start removing noise what we're doing effectively is pulling out frequencies that are offensive to the ears. Well, human speech covers a pretty wide range of frequencies, and if any of those bad frequencies match any of the frequencies that aaron the voice, we're going to lose quality in the voice so we can certainly remove up that nasty sound simply by going into our audio inspector window going over to our audio enhancements. Sorry, just one of these clips there. There we go. Audio enhancement swing click right here and we're gonna go to background noise removal this is telling me hum removal I have a feeling it's not gonna work well and this is what I mean by final cut just trying to tell me what might work in what might not let's try it though I'm gonna click home removal and I have a choice here of two frequencies fifty hurts or sixty hertz I'm not quite sure where this is that because I'm not looking at it on a equalizer scale so it's kind of hard to tell me where the frequencies so I'm just gonna listen back with that enabled and see what happens I'm jordan's father okay? It pulled it out a little bit it's still there somewhat let's listen back, let's, listen to it originally and then I'll add it I'm jordan's father on behalf of myself and jordan's mom kim okay, so you can see I was turning it on and off it helps a little bit. I think I might get a better result from using just the background noise removal because I think the frequencies that were trying to remove or a little bit different than a little bit higher so I'm gonna click background noise removal and now we can adjust the intensity of this. So I'm just going to play this back without this on and then we'll add it and see what happens let's expand this out a little bit, watch what happens to the sound when I read when I remove when I add the background noise and we will watch this I'm jordan's father on behalf of myself at okay so it gets rid of its somewhat weaken now increase the intensity of that so let's play that back again without I'm jordan's father with behalf of myself and jordan's mom kim it's a great pleasure to welcome all of you teo the wedding today not there anymore right? It's gone watch listen to the beginning of this is where the noise wass I'm jordan his father on the has gone but what happened to the voice? I'm jordan's father on that's into the original and see if you could tell the difference in the quality of his voice not the noise I'm jordan's father on behalf of myself and jordan's mom kim it's a great pleasure to welcome all of you teo the wedding today his voice got very tinny. Okay? It was we pulled out a lot of the of the low frequency in his voice so we're left with his voice. It sounds like it's underwater is a little garbled and that's one of the drawbacks to removing background noise from audio. There are other programs out there that would require you to export this audio or bring it in before you important into final cut and tweak it further and could probably get a better result I'm not going to go through that right now but basically these background noise removal tools while having them is great, they're limited, but they will save you in a pension. Let me tell you something. When I put some music to this, you're not going to really notice that decrease in oi and and voice quality that much it's not going to send your father on behalf myself and george? Yeah, to me, it sounds like crap. Is my client going to notice it? Probably not. I mean, maybe it might be subtle to their ears, you know, but, you know, we have to do it. We have to do if I didn't have another audio source of that, we just have to kind of deal with your questions. So if you were to add bass after the fact would have just add the hum back in let's try it. Great question that brings me to actually great segue way you are the master of segways, matt, you keep segway ing means into the next thing I'm going to talk about and it's awesome. Cool. All right, so let matt's question is if we just go back and add some bass, will that bring the noise back or will that just increase the quality well, let's, try it let's, go back, we're going to select our clip we're gonna go back out using this little back arrow we're going go into our main audio inspector window and you'll notice there right here next to our audio enhancements we have this little equaliser icon I'm just gonna click that and look at that we have a graphic equalizer ok this is how a graphic equalizer work's okay there's many many different types of graphic equalizer they're all different in their own way summer software base of our hardware base this is this basic software based graphic you could have ten bands meaning ten sliders you can have thirty one individual sliders don't let this intimidate you okay all a graphic equalizer is is a representation of frequency ranges audio is away form and way forms have different frequencies my voice has many many different frequencies of way forms and that's what gives it a very distinct sound everybody has their own unique wave form that's generated by your vocal cords when you speak and putting air through vocal chords so graphic accuse work like this everything on the left side is low basie frequencies low frequencies slower frequencies wider wave forms as we move more toward the right we get shorter frequencies we get you know much more high frequency sound okay it's not rolling frequencies of mohr close together in terms of the of the way form itself the wave the sound wave so we can increase base by adding in these low frequencies human speech for both male and females combined range somewhere between the two hundred hertz and somewhere around the five to maybe six fifty or seven hundred hertz frequency range this is where human speech lies so maybe a male would be a little bit further down the scale on a female a little bit further up the scale so these sliders here would really start to affect human speech all right, these over here going affect the low end these over here are going to affect the high end right these extreme high frequencies over here this is like wind through pine needles sri lee hyeon frequencies where these down here are very guttural low and sound frequencies so we can sort of play with us a little bit and see what happens to our voice I'm just going to play the voice I'm going to play the voice back and then we're gonna add in these frequencies and see what happens. I'm jordan's father on behalf of myself and jordan's mom kim it's a great pleasure to welcome all of you teo the wedding we were absolutely able tto add backs and base into his voice today okay? So some cases might work great some cases it might not I don't think it really brought back the noise let's say I'm jordan's father on not really now when working with voice and accused it's sometimes best to get into the mindset of not adding sound but taking away sound because adding will increase noise just like being the gain on your camera or the esso adds noise if you add frequency or add volume two frequencies you're actually adding noise so we can try to do get the same effect by instead of raising bass taking out the higher end and let's see what that does so we're gonna decrease these knobs over here somewhere in that human speech range right about here actually let's say I'm jordan's father on behalf of myself and jordan's mom kim it's a great pleasure to welcome all of you teo the wedding today okay, so we're able tto take take out some of that garbage lee high end that's sparkly high end but we lost some volume because we're taking away frequency so we can just increase the volume a little bit and maybe I'm jordan's father on behalf of myself not too bad it sounds a hell of a lot better then this I'm jordan's father, I'm okay so there's a middle ground there and you have to kind of play around with it but I mean I'll tell you what to have those features right final cut person that's pretty powerful stuff and I'm really happy about that and let me tell you something when it comes to audio cues and sweet evening audio, we're going to spend a whole segment on on that on the last day when we finish our edit, we're going to sweeten the audio and really when you have good quality audio and you add in nice, you know, you enhance those good that was good parts, it really sweetens it up so it's great that you brought that up, man, because he really kind of led me into that so many questions about you and noise removal I mean there's, you know here, let's, try this next clip real quick, just a quick, idiotic questions don't worry, you won't need to remember his name it's not that serious. Now here we have a hiss this is high end stuff, this is high end frequency that needs to come out so let's use our background noise removal and see what happens here. Don't worry, you won't need to remember his name it's not that serious. That was the memorable she got really tinny, very fast. She sounds really garbling a memorable way. That's jordan okay, so if we were to kind of go back out to our e q, I don't know it's safe to see real quick and let's try to rob removed from the high end don't worry, you won't need to remember his name it's not that serious that was the memorable that jordan that gets really muddy that's problem audio right there on dh again we can remove some of that sound and hopefully when we blended with some music it'll sound a little bit better but you see the two extremes one actually worked really well and the other one's not working very well at all. So that's noise removal in nutshell yeah. Did you want to take some questions at this point? So many questions do you ever just skip using the canned noise and revel and just go straight into manually equalizing? Everything depends. I usually give the final cut pro over noise removal tools a shot first. Ever since I started using an audio technician on my jobs, these problems pretty much gone away because you can actually equalize it out on site. But not everybody has the luxury of an audio technician, so again, I will be classified under that that under personal preference whatever you think you can do to get the best result, try it and see what happens. Okay, a few people in the chat rooms had questions about silencing fountain specifically in weddings. Sound of fountain yeah, common with outdoor ceremonies. You know, nobody likes to hear the sound of what sounds like somebody peeing um that would depend on the frequency of the sound um it would also depend on how close the microphone was to the source all right here's, the thing with audio okay, if you're recording audio from faraway of somebody talking and you've got a fountain here, your beat, there's nothing you're going to do that's going to remove that fountain to make you hear that person standing over their sound any better? Okay, but if you have a microphone on that person really close to their body on their on their body, you know, sort of like this, and by the way, if I bring this up to my mouth, you people at home will notice that my voice gets a little bit more basic and it gets a little bit more rich, and by pulling it away, it becomes a little bit more, you know, a little bit less basically, but more high end that will help tremendously, having them like this close and then trying to remove a background sound. If the frequency of that fountain was, like, really high, you might be able to pull out some of it again, it's, like I wouldn't know unless we actually tried to work with it, but I would suggest giving something like this to try and see what happens. Thank you. Okay, question from inca how can you copy and paste equalizer frequencies from one clip to another that might be from the same setting, good question, okay, so we've applied equalizer to both these clips. Let's, take the equalizer off this morning. So let's, go in here and I'm just gonna flatten e q by clicking flattening hewitt's gonna drop it down across the board let's go over to where the clip where we have equalizer frequency and I was going to double check that I do. I do have some equalizer frequency there. Okay? And if we come over here to our clip and we write I'm sorry if we comand see to copy it's basically copying the attributes both video and audio of this clip. Well, this case, just audio. The attributes of this clip if I come over here and click and hit shift command v okay, let's, see what I can d'oh ah there's, a checkbox for e q. I can click this and hit paste and it will pace the settings from this clip over this clip. Pretty cool. So if you have a bunch of clips that are all the same person talking, you've got him all cut up and you need to copy it over several clips. That's how you do it.

Class Description

In this Apple Final Cut Pro X course, explore FCP X in-depth with Rob Adams and Vanessa Joy! Rob teaches editing theory and practice, helping you master all the important aspects to this complex program. Using examples from wedding films and corporate films, Rob shows how he uses the many tools in Final Cut Pro X most effectively. If you're interested in editing your own work, this Apple Final Cut Pro X training tutorial is for you!

Ryan Pierson

Rob Adams and Vanessa Joy are incredible speakers and thoughtful educators. In three days, they take you through the basics of editing theory and explain everything you need to know to dive into FCP X. Rob even details how to do advanced color grading at a pace that is clear and easy to understand. Without a doubt, this course has done more to improve my personal and professional use of FCP X than five years of experience working with video and audio. A+ great course.

a Creativelive Student

Thoroughly enjoying this course! I have seen all of Rob & Vanessa's creativelive workshops to date and am constantly and consistently learning something new. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. I am really looking forward to working this into our company with our first cinematography wedding in May!
Courtney Liske Photography

Charlie

Simply brilliant! I had no idea where to start with FCP and even though I am now using an updated version... this course has been invaluable!!! Thank you Rob and Vanessa!